


Anemoia (n.)

by peterpan_in_neverland



Series: have you ever felt things beyond the human language? [1]
Category: Never Have I Ever (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rebecca is a badass motherfucker, also I'm not a fan of the whole "insert original character", anyway, but for reasons (that are not bias), hes just charming, i really enjoy Cameron, let me know if i need to add any tags or anything into this, this is mostly just an imagined backstory for Rebecca
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:33:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24530848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterpan_in_neverland/pseuds/peterpan_in_neverland
Summary: Rebecca Hall-Yoshida loves who she is. She really does. She loves that her hair is long and blonde and barely tangles, even when she goes a few days without brushing it. She loves how dark her eyes are, how her dad describes them (“Karera wa chiteki de mugendesu, watashi no aisuru”). She loves that her right ear has seven piercings, and her left only has six. She loves that she speaks Japanese fluently. She loves her sense of style, her family, her cat.There are three things, however, that she doesn’t love, and she keeps the list written down on a notecard in her underwear drawer. It has flowers doodled on it in pink fine point marker, and she hopes to God her family never sees it.--OR Rebecca is much more than just Paxton's sister
Relationships: Rebecca Hall-Yoshida/Original Male Character
Series: have you ever felt things beyond the human language? [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778254
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26





	Anemoia (n.)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! A few things before you read: 
> 
> 1) This is a bit of a different piece than what I usually write.  
> 2) There is talk of sex, and a very minour *almost* sex act, but not enough (in my opinion) to actually warrant a mature rating.  
> 3) Please enjoy, and leave a comment if you do! Your comments fuel me and leave me upright and breathing, so they are, naturally, very appreciated. Thank you!

Rebecca Hall-Yoshida loves who she is. She really does. She loves that her hair is long and blonde and barely tangles, even when she goes a few days without brushing it. She loves how dark her eyes are, how her dad describes them ( _“Karera wa chiteki de mugendesu, watashi no aisuru”)._ She loves that her right ear has seven piercings, and her left only has six. She loves that she speaks Japanese fluently. She loves her sense of style, her family, her cat. 

There are three things, however, that she doesn’t love, and she keeps the list written down on a notecard in her underwear drawer. It has flowers doodled on it in pink fine point marker, and she hopes to God her family never sees it.

Number One: when people talk to her like she’s a child. She _isn’t_ a child. She is nineteen years old— twenty in July— and she is applying to the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, and she’s an adult. She pays taxes. She has a high school diploma, one with honours. She speaks two languages. She makes fifty percent of her own clothes. _She is an adult,_ a grown woman.

Number Two: when people think she isn’t an _actual_ part of her family. She doesn’t look like her parents. She _knows_ that, okay? Her mom is a Swedish anomaly, with dark curly hair and the greenest eyes Rebecca has ever seen. Her dad is Japanese, and Paxton looks like the exact medium of them. But, where they are tanned and dark haired, Rebecca is blonde, with fair skin that burns in the sun too easily for someone who lives in California. 

She knows that she looks different from them, that she _is_ different from them, but every time a waitress assumes her family is a party of three and that she is by herself, a little spark of anger swirls up in her throat. She always makes some kind of joke, like, _“yeah, I found them out in the parking lot, and they seem decent enough to keep,”_ but secretly, she’s screaming. 

Number Three: that her brother, Paxton Hall-Yoshida, is simultaneously her best friend and her biggest pain in the ass. 

Paxton is the best person she’s ever known. He lets her play his video games before he even beats them, he buys her her favourite sodas from the gas station when he stops to fill up his car, and he cuts people that talk shit about her out of his life. But, he is also overbearingly protective of her sometimes, with so many horribly embarrassing moments to prove it. Like their cat, and him kicking Devi out, and _everything_ that happened with Cameron. 

_Cameron._

Cameron is the prettiest and kindest boy that Rebecca has ever met, and sometimes, when she can't sleep at night, she entertains fantasies about what could have happened if Paxton hadn’t been such a… a Paxton. 

Cameron— Cammy, she had liked calling him that, liked watching his cheeks get pink when she said it, and in revenge, he called her Roo— is one of Paxton’s friends' older brothers. He has dreadlocks that brush his shoulder blades and brown skin (she thinks it’s the colour of her moms homemade hot chocolate) and a perfect, toothy grin. He’s tall, and smart, and seventeen when Rebecca meets him in her senior year of high school. 

Paxton throws a party while their parents are away in Japan for a funeral— Rebecca is in charge, because she’s always in charge, because she’s the oldest— and Paxton throws a party anyway. He’s rebellious, a freshman in high school, with a barely-there ponytail and a six pack that he’s had since he was twelve years old. He’s started shaving, and he thinks he’s hot shit, and Rebecca reminds him daily that he isn't. 

Paxton invites Michael, and Michael’s older brother— Cameron— comes to the party with him. At first, Rebecca hates him. He doesn’t seem to care that his little brother and his friends are slowly destroying Rebecca's house, and it really pisses her off, because she knows she’ll be the one that has to clean it up. 

But, when the party starts to die down, Cameron picks up empty beer cans, throwing them into a trash bag he’s carrying around with him. And Rebecca helps, breaking down the pizza boxes and shoving them into the blue garbage can outside her house. 

“You should really recycle those, y’know,” Cameron says, emptying the trash bag of beer cans into the recycling. 

“Actually, you can’t recycle cardboard with grease stains,” she tells him, smirking, and crossing her arms. 

Seventeen is her age of rebellion. She gets her nose pierced with a fake ID and has a stick n poke tattoo on the underneath of her left breast that she’s hiding from her parents, and she considers Janis Joplin her personal hero. Looking back, she loves this age for her, even though it isn’t who she is anymore. 

“Is that right?” Cameron asks, crossing his arms, like he wants to mock her. 

“It is,” she asserts, and it’s times like these that she wishes she was just a little bit taller or more intimidating, or maybe a little bit of both, because Cameron is looking her up and down like he is sizing her up for a fight, and she’s trying to remember how to throw a punch.

Then, he smiles, this deep throated chuckle coming up from his chest and it makes heat shoot up Rebecca's spine. He holds his hand out. “I’m Cameron,” he says, smiling at her, and her heart is beating faster and faster. 

“Rebecca.” She takes his hand— it’s soft, the creases in his palms defined, and she can feel them when her fingers brush against his skin— and shakes it once, twice, three times. 

_This is the beginning,_ she knows now, lying in bed, her glow-in-the-dark stars staring down at her from the ceiling, like they can see her. Like they know her.

Rebecca and Cameron end up sitting on the roof, splitting what’s left of the pizza. Her mom would kill her if she saw her— she hates that Rebecca can climb out on the roof from her bedroom window, and she hates even more that Rebecca actually does it— but her mom isn’t here and she’s a teenager and she wants to enjoy the opportunities that she gets to be normal. 

Because she isn’t. She isn’t normal. She attends a high school for gifted students, students that are smarter than other kids their age, and she lives in a world that is held up by fierce competition. Her dad says that Rebecca is the smartest person he knows, and she knows that he’s being honest. 

“What’s your favourite thing to do?” Cameron asks her, pulling a pepperoni off his slice of pizza and chewing around the edges of it with his front teeth. 

She hums. Most of what she does is school or spending time with her family, so she tells him that, and when she does, he laughs. “Excuse me?” she asks, raising her eyebrows. Laughing at her favourite things is the same as laughing at her, and she doesn’t tolerate people laughing at her. Especially not boys who sit on her roof with her and make her stomach catch butterflies.

“That’s not, like, an activity,” Cameron says, like it’s obvious, “don’t you like to read? Or, like, paint? Study bugs? Rob banks?” He adds the last one just to make her laugh, she knows that, and it does. 

She tries to think, really think, about what she does in her spare time. For a minute that feels like years as Cameron stares at her, she comes up empty. She thinks, _is this really all I am anymore, school and my family? Is this really, truly the size of my world?_ before she remembers the twenty-seven hundred Instagram posts she has bookmarked under _fashion inspo._ on her Instagram account. 

“I like fashion,” she says, and Cameron smiles at her, and it seems like it stretches from one ear to the next. He has dimples, and she likes dimples, especially on him.

A special kind of recklessness reserved for the main characters of John Hughes movies soaks into her skin, and she leans forward and kisses him, pressing her hands against the underside of his jaw, relishing the scrape of his stubble against the sensitive skin on her palms. 

The sound that Cameron makes as he slides one of his hands up her back nearly rips her in half. 

It isn't her first kiss, not by a longshot. She’s played spin the bottle and seven minutes in Heaven and she’s had sex before. Not good sex, but sex. She’s dated and danced around relationships and once, accidentally seduced a boy in her trigonometry class. 

But this feels different. Cameron’s other hand has pulled out the hair tie holding Rebecca's hair in a braid, and it unravels, falling around her face. He runs his hand through it, and his fingers work like a comb, rooting out the tangles. Her scalp starts tingling, and it works it’s way down her entire body until she can feel her heartbeat in her toes. His touch is setting her skin on fire, and he knows it.

He has his lips on her neck when her neighbour's car alarm goes off. It startles her, and she jumps back, and almost falls off her roof. She knows that Mr Thompson started the alarm on purpose, because her parents tell him to keep an eye on her and Paxton whenever they’re gone overnight. The car alarm turns off. Cameron laughs.

“Do you wanna go inside?” Rebecca asks him, nodding her head towards her open window. Cameron traces his fingers along the side of her palm and up her arm. 

“ _Please_.” His voice is thick, like he has just woken up in the morning. Rebecca draws in a shaky breath. He kisses her palm.

And, that easily, that quickly, she falls in love with him. The messy, judged, overrated teenagers in high school kind of love. They go on dates and share stories and tell jokes and have sex in the back of his car, her bedroom at two in the morning, a hotel off of Ventura Boulevard. She tells him everyday how much she loves his smile, and he says the same about her hands. Tells her the reasons. Touches them like they’re made of glass. It’s perfect and wonderful and real and she doesn’t tell her family. 

She has a few reasons swirling around in her mind as to why she doesn't. Because she thinks, a little bit, that her mom will disapprove. Because she's worried that her dad will try to teach him Japanese. But, mostly, because she knows that Paxton will kick his ass. He means well, he really does, but his protective streak stretches out to people that she cares about. _Cats_ that she cares about. Cameron, who she cares about, who she loves.

And, Paxton proves it on Cameron and Rebecca's eight month anniversary. 

Paxton is supposed to be at swim practice until four-thirty, and her parents work until five. She’s graduated high school by now, and is in the middle of a gap year, working at Old Navy and spending as much time with Cameron as she can before he leaves for Rhode Island for college in September. 

Rebecca and Cameron are on the couch, Cameron’s body slotted over hers. He’s kissing her, kissing her mouth, neck, chest, stomach, and she can feel his breath over the skin on her thighs, when Paxton comes home early. 

She pushes Cameron away, and he tumbles off the couch, and it would be funny if Paxton weren’t staring at her, at Cameron, with a look in his eyes that Rebecca has never seen before. She is about to say something, to open her mouth, to explain, but Paxton yanks Cameron to his feet by his shirt collar. 

Paxton hits him, once, hard, in the face. And Cameron buckles, his body hitting the ground heavily, and Rebecca is frozen. Cameron gets up, slowly— he’s breathing heavy, and there’s blood on his face— and looks Paxton up and down, like he is sizing him up, and Rebecca knows that this can end only one way. 

But, even though she thinks she knows everything about him, she learns that Cameron can still surprise her, because he shakes his head and covers his nose with his hand and leaves. 

Paxton asks her if she’s okay, and she’s honest: she tells him no, tells him that he screwed up, and when he refuses to apologize to Cameron, she screams at him that she loves him. And Paxton scoffs, then gets quiet, then shouts after her when she runs to her room and slams the door.

She doesn’t speak to Paxton beyond _good morning, goodnight_ for eight days, and when they finally speak again, it’s like nothing has happened. Because, by then, it’s like nothing has. And it’s like that because she convinces herself that it's true, that nothing has happened. 

She can’t be heartbroken over her and Cameron if her and Cameron never happened in the first place. 

Now, fourteen months after Cameron and nineteen days after applying to FIDM, she looks up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling, stares at them. Closes her eyes, and they’re still there, pressed against the darkness of her eyelids. 

She had, a long time ago, attributed a quality about herself that she loves to each of them. It was her way to start to like herself, during her hormonal middle school years, when she realized that other girls her age were getting boyfriends and dating, and all the boys in her grade could seem to think about her was that she was the nerd with Down syndrome.

_Long blonde hair_ is the star in the corner nearest her, and the one next to it is _dark eyes_ , and it goes on. _Brains, piercings, sense of style,_ until she gets to the last one, and the last one is _hands_ . It was not _hands_ until she met Cameron.

She tries to stop thinking about him. She really does. But, the thing is, he has made his way into her blood and her bones, has inscribed himself into her DNA and all her vital organs. Has made her feel things that all the words she knows can’t seem to spell out. 

Rebecca has a list of feelings that are almost too impossible to describe pinned on the wall next to her door, to remind herself that it is impossible for anyone, really, _anyone_ , to know everything. 

She has added a star next to _anemoia_ — nostalgia for a time you’ve never known— because that is what she feels about Cameron. 

She rolls over, and relents, thinks _he really happened we happened and we were together and my life was so so good and i was so so happy_ , and grabs her phone from her nightstand. She finds Cameron on Instagram so easily that she regrets not doing it sooner. 

_hey_. she texts, and watches a read receipt show up under the message. She holds her breath, something that feels suspiciously like the rest of her life flying in and out of reach in front of her, and all she can think about is his dimples.

_hi roo_ Cameron replies, and her heart beats faster faster faster, _i miss you sweetheart_

No punctuation. Never punctuation. _I do not like things that end, and I almost never watch movies because of it,_ he tells her, sitting on her bedroom floor, six weeks after they have met, and she has never forgotten it.

She smiles, and starts to type out a reply. 

_have you ever heard of the word anemoia?_

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading, please leave kudos, and as always, your comments keep me alive! They keep my crops watered and my skin clear. Thank you!


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